Now that my new living room/office plan is starting to come along, I decided it was finally time to update you guys. After deciding to flank my picture window with bookshelves, it was time to make our move. We hit up Ikea while visiting Derek’s parents in Houston a few weeks ago and planned to cram two Billy Bookcases into my little Honda. We knew the Mini couldn’t handle it, so we drove my car 200 miles praying the whole way that our measurements were accurate. And LaFonda the Honda had just enough trunk room/backseat room/a little bit of front armrest room to get the job done. Boy was that the most stressful game of Tetris ever.

So, just to refresh your memory, here is the new furniture layout for my living room/office.

After a month I’m still loving how open yet cozy the whole space feels with the addition of the bookshelves on each side of my window. You should always sketch everything out before making a big purchase to decide if you’re really ready to take the plunge. Especially when the plunge is 3 hours away.

My living room is not only homey, but functional. My shelves allow me to store all of my resource books, drafting supplies, and of course my ceramic animal safari [which I've recently added to, more on that later].

I know I know, it looks a little chaotic in these photos with my old desk and chair in place of my new desk [coming this weekend!] But try and picture one 3′x6′ door sitting on these trestle legs in place of a desk and two chairs that don’t belong.

We’ve had a lot of readers [particularly this one] asking about some key tips to styling their bookshelves. So I wanted to share with you the method to my madness.

STEP ONE: start with the main course

This allows you to start with the most important items you’ll be placing on your bookshelf whether it be books, records, family photos, whatever. In my case they were books. I’m a big fan of allowing my books to go comando. Jackets just cover up the original character of the book and I can’t get enough of their colorful spines. Derek thinks it’s ridiculous but I also like to arrange my books by color. I think it makes it a little more visually interesting and adds a little balance. Plus being someone who majored in colors, I can actually identify my books better by the color than the name. Go figure. Also I placed each shelf evenly which meant that any book taller than 11″ wouldn’t fit, so I set these books aside for horizontal stacking. Try to alternate your horizontal stacking to keep your shelves looking balanced.

STEP TWO: keep it functional

Next I added in the functional items I’d be keeping on my shelves. Because my living room also doubles as an office, I’ll also be using my shelving for office storage. I wanted to incorporate these items early in the game so that I could make sure they were still easily accessible, rather than sticking them on the top shelf because I was too focused on my ceramic animal collection. I used the third shelf from the bottom [on each side of my desk] to hold all of my client binders and small storage bins containing Prismacolors, pencils, glue, fabric, and other supplies I’ll need all the time. I placed my large storage bins on each bottom shelf because 1. they’re physically heavy, and I don’t want to lift them over my head 97 times a day, and 2. because they’re visually heavy and would make my shelves appear top heavy and awkward.

STEP THREE: add big accessories

Now that all of the bulky items are set in place it’s time to fill in the gaps with some of your larger accessories. This can be bowls, decorative boxes, vases, whatever you fancy. You can stack them on some of your horizontal books, or on the shelf if they’re really big. Just try to keep everything looking balanced. If you have a stack of books with a not-so-big accessory on top, place a larger item next to them to trick the eye into thinking everything is symmetrical without being too matchy-matchy.

STEP FOUR: add some finishing touches

Here is where you get to have fun filling in all the remaining gaps and rearranging everythign to your heart’s conent! Add some little vases with flowers, a lego set or three, anything you like! Also, please don’t think that I came up with this after my first attempt. This took me a couple of days of arranging, testing it out for a few hours and rearranging, until I was happy with the outcome. I’m still not 100%, but at least it’s a start. For now I’m going to wait and see how my new old desk pulls everything together. See? That’s the fun with styling shelves, you can change everything around as you please.

Oh and if you’re wondering about the items on the very very top shelf, I wanted to add some height and cover up the 2′ of bare wall above each bookshelf. The shelf on the right has some weird items behind the gold S, which are actually placeholders for two canvases that are in the process of being painted.

So there you have it, next up on the living room adgenda is to paint and setup my new desk and finish the pendant lamp I’ve been working on since January. You’ll understand why it’s taken so long once I finally post about it. Stay tuned!

cfs